Speak Up – Kōrerotia
National Identity –15 April 2015
This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s Community Access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of NZ On Air.
Female [Plains FM] / Coming up next conversations on race relations and human rights with Speak Up – Kōrerotia, here on Plains FM.
Sally
[Intro] / E ngā mana,
E ngā reo,
E ngā hau e whā
Tēnā koutou katoa
Nau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.
Join the NZ Human Rights Commission as it engages in conversations around race and diversity in our country. Tune in as our guests speak up sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to speak up when the moment is right.
Sally / Hello and welcome to Speak Up -Kōrerotia, which airs every third Wednesday of the month from 9pm – 10.00. I’m your host Sally Carlton, a human rights specialist at the Human Rights Commission in Christchurch. Today’s show will feature three guests, James Liu of Massey University, Mike Grimshaw of the University of Canterbury and Bev Watson, National Coordinator of the Race Unity Speech Awards. Ko te kaupapa o tēnei rā, ko ‘national identity’ – What does it mean to be a New Zealander today?
In just a couple of weeks’ time the centenary of the landings at Gallipoli will be commemorated. The arrival of Australian and New Zealand troops on the shores of Turkey is viewed by many New Zealanders as a nation building moment, when these countries were able to assert themselves on the world stage. This idea has been perpetuated across the decades – yet what does this event and the story of nationhood which accompanies it, mean 100 years on? In a country where one quarter of the population is born overseas, do New Zealanders continue to relate to the message of ANZAC Day? Does the event hold much meaning for people? These are some of the questions we’ll be discussing as a basis for exploring the idea. What does it mean to be a New Zealander today?
Our first guest is James Liu, Head of the School of Psychology at Massey University. James’ research interests include changing demographic trends within New Zealand as well as the relationship between identity and history in the New Zealand, Chinese and international context.
James, you describe yourself as a Chinese American New Zealander, that’s probably a great place to start our discussion of national identity and what being a New Zealander means. Could you please elaborate a bit on this self-description?
James / Oh yes, it’s probably...apropo to bring up the cricket results because New Zealanders never feel so Kiwi as when one of our sports teams are successful and I became a citizen of New Zealand in 1997 and after the ceremony, you know when I became a New Zealand citizen, I went to some friends, these Kiwi blokes were watching the All Blacks and I told them what happened and they go “Oh Jim, that’s great, congratulations, you’re one of us now, you’re a Kiwi” and I said “No, I’m a Chinese American New Zealander”. And that was very meaningful for me at that point as a new migrant to the country of three years and that’s because I didn’t really identify with them so much. I was trying to learn to appreciate rugby and cricket but I didn’t know a whole lot about ANZAC Day at that stage and so the idea that I would be homogenised into one single whole unified national identity didn’t really fit well with me and the research in psychology has shown that new migrants prefer an integrative approach so where they get to blend or select aspects of their own identity with that of the national identity in the country that they migrate to.
Sally / And I guess the next question then is do you blend or select the sport?
James / For myself I do quite a bit of shifting. I think we’re in an incredibly privileged position in this country. First of all, we have no natural enemies; second of all, we have this wonderful democratic tradition that is safe guarded via Australia by the great sheriff of the Pacific: the United States. So that’s one aspect of my identity but the other thing is that our economy now is increasingly dependent on Asia, especially China whose demand for milk powder is insatiable and so I shift back and forth. I travel a lot internationally; I’m fluent in both English and Chinese. If I shift into Chinese I’m able to behave at least somewhat like a Chinese person. My accent changes when I go to the US and I understand that things are quite different in the US so I would say that I am shifting in a different context. I started to blend more because I’ve been here for so long now but blending isn’t really easy, it’s much easier to hold different contexts separate and then just fit into those contexts for me.
Sally / That’s very interesting.
James, can you tell us a little bit about your work please and has your journey with all these different identities influenced that path?
James / Sure, psychology is a very interesting field and I think the phrase that often applies is physician heal thyself. I think the phrase for psychology is psychologists understand thyself and essentially I’ve become the Head of School of Psychology at Massey University which does quite a lot of distance education, outreach, mature students and that type of thing is really about refining, understanding yourself better. I got into this research simply because I was born in Taiwan, I grew up in a southern part of the United States so in the boot heel of southern Illinois, they talk a little bit like this [puts on accent] and some of the customs that people go hunting [RL1]and fishing.
Sally / You do it very well, that accent.
James / Ah yes, I’m just joking though.
So I found it quite difficult growing up there to fit in so in terms of this identity issue as a psychologist, people often try and understand themselves and then they find out while their experiences are simply a reflection of what everyone else experiences. A majority member has an identity; they’re just not called upon to confront it as often as a minority group member. And so that distinction between majority and minority and inter-group relations is how I began, but then when I arrived to New Zealand I just realised that so many things that we took for granted in the United States like the pervasiveness of racism were actually cultural constructions.
So to give you an example: I’ve just recently analysed the speeches from the throne from 1854 until now with a student Angela Robinson and we found that there is not a single instance of biologically-oriented racism; that is, inferiority or superiority directed in any of the speeches towards Māori/Pākehā relations. Instead, what we find is quite a persistent idea of benevolence; you know, that’s this very British Empire liberalism: Well, we’re here to bring the torch of civilisation to all of humanity, we’re here to help… You know, there’s a lot of respect given to Māori simply because when we analyse this research on social representations of history, if settlers took things into their own hands, they generally got shot up quite badly, like the Wairoa incident, so there was quite a bit of respect for Māori because of their military prowess but also just in that particular place, the racial inferiority just didn’t play itself out, it was very different. There were intimations of biculturalism from the very beginning, even though this of course didn’t really blossom until recent times with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
So I became even more conscious of my culture and how history and historical trajectory, that there was always an evenhandedness between the colonial regime which was bent on getting on the land and achieving sovereignty over the land and Māori who are fairly successful at resisting this for some series of time, that history created a significant amount of national identity in New Zealand which is very different between the United States where you have a history of slavery. And so racism in the United States is influenced by the fact that the United States had slavery for almost 300 years and to maintain slavery you’ve got to believe in superiority and inferiority in a way you never had to in New Zealand.
Sally / That’s very interesting, so you’re basically saying that the sort of construction of race and racial relationships is different in America and New Zealand because of slavery, is that right?
James / That’s the argument, that’s a historical argument and we can throw some empirical evidence at it as well. Psychology is positioned as both an art and a science and so the science of for instance, biculturalism in New Zealand is really interesting. There’s a task that a colleague of mine from the University of Auckland, Chris Sibley and I did called the implicit associations task. It was invented in the US but we applied it to looking at brown, white and yellow faces so you know, people that look different, and pairing them up with national symbols of New Zealand or symbols of foreign countries and the way this IAT works is that people often don’t tell you what they really think if you ask them directly. If I say “Sally are you racist?”.
Sally / Sure, you say “no”.
James / I know what the answer is going to be right. But then I can get you to click on these things and say how quickly can you pair a white face with symbolism of New Zealand, a brown face with symbolism of New Zealand or a yellow face with symbolism of New Zealand versus other countries and then we look at the difference in milliseconds between your reaction times versus pairing those with foreign symbols. And what happens is… So this is very scientific in terms of methodology. What happens is: New Zealand is the only post-colonial Anglo-settler society in the world in which university students react equally quickly to brown – that is, Māori – faces and white – that is, Pākehā – faces to pairing up with symbols of New Zealand. So we are actually symbolically bi-cultural, at least for the young people of New Zealand. Which is not true in Australia; in Australia, whites are reacted to much quicker than Aboriginals. It’s not true in the United States; whites are reacted to much closer to symbols of the United States than African Americans, even in domains where African Americans are completely dominant like in track and field Olympic athletics. By contrast, Chinese or east Asian faces are reacted to much slower when people try to pair them up with symbols of New Zealand.
Sally / That’s really interesting James and I’ve heard you speak about that before and it was really fascinating research and the visuals really helped this become really clear and that was great.
We’re just going to take a break and then we’ll come back and talk I think a little bit more about this idea of biculturalism and multiculturalism in New Zealand. Just before we do, you’ve chosen a song for us today. You’ve chosen ‘Reach’ by Gloria Estefan, can you just give us very briefly a reason why you chose it?
James / Oh it’s about aspiration and I think identity is about aspiration as much as it is about some reality or fact.
Sally / Thank you, here we go.
MUSIC– “REACH” BY GLORIA ESTEFAN
Sally / Welcome back to Speak Up - Kōrerotia, the radio show of the Human Rights Commission playing here on Plains FM 96.9.
We’ve been speaking with James Liu about New Zealand and we were just speaking with him about his research on how people in New Zealand react to symbols of identity in New Zealand and James, you finished by saying that New Zealanders react equally well to white versus brown faces but not so well to yellow. I’m really interested to delve into this a little bit more and hear your thoughts on biculturalism versus multiculturalism and as New Zealand’s population changes, how do these two concepts sit alongside each other?
James / Yes. Well let me start off a little bit about this unusual symbolic inclusion of Māori in the New Zealand national identity. I think this is earned through the decades, through the centuries of these two groups of people evolving and in significant respects becoming one people. The difficulty for Māori has always been that this symbolic inclusion has come at a cost, which is essentially the loss the sovereignty, the loss of land and then to have a marginal position within the economy traditionally. So that’s one trajectory – so the symbolic inclusion – and there’s economic marginalisation, which is only now being addressed with the fiscal envelope for the past injustices.
The history with respect to Asians is very, very different, so although there were Chinese in New Zealand from the 19th century on, primarily as a result of the Otago gold rush, these were very small in number. They were faced with egregious discrimination and learned to really fit in, whereas the majority of Asians that arrived in New Zealand, arrived post-1987 and so that’s why they are not as symbolically included in the New Zealand national identity.
Māori symbols and Māori people are very much woven into the history of New Zealand and so that’s what the IAT [experiment] picks up, is this association, this common association between them.
With Asians, the large numbers only came post-87 and so you don’t have that long time association, and I think Kiwis are very subtle and very nuanced in the way they express prejudice. I think Kiwis hate to be called prejudiced or racist in any way, shape or form, and I mention that this is even in the colonial era when the land wars were being fought, there was still very little directly overtly racist language directed at Māori. There was far more, for instance, directed, even by Abraham Lincoln, towards African Americans in the 1860s in the United States.
So the expression of racism comes in typically subtle forms here. So it might be that if you send your CV in, this is a research that a colleague of mine, colleague Warddid, if you send a CV in and it has relatively equivalent qualifications, if your last name sounds Chinese you’ll have less of a chance of getting a call back than if your name sounds English. So there are these prejudices that exist perhaps because of lack of familiarity, perhaps because of stereotypes. And so when people come to this country they do experience different degrees of welcome depending on what part of the world they come from.
Sally / James with that research on the surnames, has that same research been carried out for Māori-sounding surnames?
James / No that hasn’t, I don’t know what the results of that would be. My guess is that you shouldn’t get any effect at and it’s possible that you could even get an advantage for a Māori-sounding surname but that’s a great idea.
Sally / Something to think about maybe.
James / Yes.
Sally / You mentioned 1987 a couple of times, what’s so key about that date and increasing numbers of Asians coming into New Zealand after that date?
James / Yes, prior to 1987 New Zealand had a more or less race-based policy for migration. After 1987 it became a points-based system, so essentially it didn’t matter what your country of origin was, it simply mattered what your qualifications were. And once that happened, it opened the doors to a much more multicultural flow of migration and that has permanently changed the face of New Zealand. Asians in 1987 would have been less than 2% of the total population of New Zealand, and now Asians are more than 12% and growing so it’s changed the whole demography of the nation substantially.
Sally / And if you could give us some more stats on how the nation is changing in terms of demographics that would be great please.
James / Ah yes, so New Zealand has always been relatively ethnically diverse because of Māori and then subsequently the influx of the relationship with Pasifika; however, this has really accelerated in recent years with essentially this theory of liberal or open migration, the fact that New Zealand’s economy almost collapsed from the 70s when Britain withdrew to the EEC and we had to search for new markets. Our new markets are now in Asia, and Asian people are coming here and contributing to our economy as well so it’s very globally oriented. And what it produces is something like a patchwork quilt and what we’re hoping is that patchwork quilt still stitches together.
Auckland is the economic engine of New Zealand, it is the most ethnically diverse part of New Zealand, anyone who buys property in Auckland realises how expensive it is and it is very different than, say, rural New Zealand, where much of our agricultural wealth comes from. So you’ll find in a place like Auckland, there’s more personality-based openness, whereas in a place like Timaru there’s on average more honesty, humility. So if that relationship between town and country, between the biculturalism and multiculturalism, it has to stitch together to manage this very complex and lumpy ethnic diversity in New Zealand.
Sally / I love that metaphor of the quilt being stitched together, that’s beautiful.
James, that’s about all we’ve got time for today unfortunately, maybe we’ll have to get you back you on the show to talk about some more points that I’d love to discuss with you.